


Bardic Inspiration

by strititty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dungeons & Dragons, Fluff, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:42:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24791791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strititty/pseuds/strititty
Summary: Dirk, Hal, and Bro invite Dave to play some D&D for date night. Silliness ensues.
Relationships: Auto-Responder | Lil Hal/Dave Strider, Dave Strider/Dirk Strider/Auto-Responder | Lil Hal/Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16
Collections: Homestuck Polyswap 2020 - Derse





	Bardic Inspiration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheMockingCrows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMockingCrows/gifts).



> Maybe a little more Dave/Hal than intended by the prompt, but hopefully this suits your fancy anyway! I saw D&D for my boys and just about lost my mind. Big props to a friend of mine for helping me get over some writer's block while I was working on this! Hope you enjoy. <3

Your name is ~~Dave Strider~~ Akwete Purrmusk, apparently, and your family is… nontraditional. 

There’s your older brother, a gold dragonborn rogue/paladin combo who’s going by Bro because he can’t be assed to come up with anything better, complete with the usual katana and pointy shades despite the setting. That’s fine, considering neither you nor your other brothers decided to drop the shades, but damn if you can’t point out the anachronisms. Pointing out anachronisms is your favorite pastime. 

And then there’s fucking Acorn, lightfoot halfling rogue, also donning pointy as fuck shades. He’s got a backstory six thousand words long and all of it to justify just how hard he min-maxed the shit out of his build. 

Somehow, you’re all related by blood, because of course a dragonborn, a halfling, and a tabaxi bard can all be related. It’s Dungeons & Dragons, copyright infringement intended. Hal mentioned something about digging into Eberron for dragonmarks to tie it all together, whatever the fuck that means, because oh right: Hal.

“Are we supposed to ignore the fact that you exist, or, like,” you gesture widely at Hal’s everything, “what?”

“Fucking hell, you’d think you’ve never roleplayed before in your life,” Hal replies. 

“How am I supposed to know, man? It’s not like I’ve ever played D&D before, and with this whole VR thing? Forget it.” Hal, unlike the rest of you, isn’t gussied up in a shiny new virtual skin. He just looks like himself, while you and Bro get to be furries and Dirk - excuse you, Acorn - is three feet shorter than he ought to be. Hal looks kind of smug about it. So does Bro.

“Look, it’s not hard,” Hal says. “Just follow our lead. This is a one-shot, nice and easy, just for you. We’ll have some light puzzle elements--”

“Light,” Bro scoffs.

“--some _light_ puzzle elements, do you think I’m going to fry Dave’s human meat brain his first game? I want this to be a nice date, not a torture chamber.” Bro’s eyebrows go way the fuck up, so you’ll assume that Hal’s style of DMing usually trends more toward absolute fuckery. “Some roleplay, some combat, a boss fight to top it off.”

“Well, gonna put aside the fact that you think my brain would fry with any puzzle harder than light because fuck it man you might be right,” you say, and pause for dramatic effect, “Dope. Let’s do it.”

“Awesome,” Hal says, his lip quirking up. He’s a little more free with smiles than Dirk or Bro, you’ve noticed. Kinda cute. All your brothers are pretty cute, though. “It seems we’re all ready to get started, then. Let me set the scene.”

And set the scene he does, dumping all of you in a tavern that fills with color and ambient noise as he describes it. Dirk mutters something about originality that Hal pointedly talks over, and for his interruption Acorn gets bumped into by what you assume feels like a very real tavern-goer. He’s not happy about this, and you figure he’s giving Hal the dirtiest fucking look under his shades. Hal just continues to look smug.

He paints you as a band of brothers out doing quests and shit for cash money, AKA gold, and the most recent quest-giver who contacted you asked to meet y’all here, in this tavern. Pretty simple story, as far as you can tell, about going into the spooky fuckin’ woods outside of town to slay an evil warlock.

“Of course,” says Hal, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep--”

“Derivative,” Dirk cuts in. “Do we really need Robert Frost up in this bitch?”

“Suck my metal chode,” Hal replies, which you think is a fucking masterwork of a response. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. You have promises to keep, and miles to go before you sleep.” 

The whole party, you included, finds itself in front of some woods that look super lovely, dark, and deep. You can feel the cold and the snow crunches under your boots--the air from your virtual lungs swirls and freezes in front of you. “Damn, Hal, you didn’t have to go this hard,” you say, drawing your arms up around you. “I can feel my balls freezing off.”

“Just a simple bit of programming,” Hal preens.

Bro rolls his eyes - probably - and tromps forward into the woods. Not here to listen to you stroke Hal’s ego, apparently. Oh well. You look at Dirk--Acorn, excuse you, and then follow in after him.

One encounter with dire wolves later, you’re beginning to think Hal wants you all dead. You have no idea what the fuck you’re doing, for one, despite Dirk and Hal continuously stopping to explain shit to you. Hey, man, at least you can do vicious mockery. That wolf’s mama so ugly she’s the reason ‘dire’ got added to their name. Eat shit, wolf.

Of course, that prompts a brief verbal scuffle between Dirk and Hal about whether wolves can actually get insulted by vicious mockery, because doesn’t it need at least a decent intelligence score or some shit, and Hal finally snaps, “I have the entire PHB and SRD at my fingertips, Dirk, I think I’m uniquely qualified to know how Vicious Mockery works.”

Then Bro steps between them and puts a large, taloned hand on each of them. Damn if him being a dragonborn ain’t intimidating. “Wolves are dead, don’t matter.”

“There’s still one left,” Hal informs him.

“Wolves are dead,” Bro repeats, and promptly rolls a seventeen plus modifiers to hit and cuts its head off with a clean eight damage. “Stop your bitching.” Encounter eviscerated, Bro moves on through the woods, leaving you all standing there in the bloody snow. 

“...So I’m not the only one who thought it was a little hot, right?”

“Not even a little bit,” Dirk agrees with you. 

“I am so glad I gave him so much lizard beef,” Hal says. 

Lizard beef aside, y’all continue into the forest, to be terrorized by the next encounter Hal has planned. 

That turns out to be a puzzle door to a creaking hut in the middle of the woods, which is basically a gigantic fancy puzzle box of moving parts. Also known as: three douchebags all pulling and poking at the door trying to get shit to line up in four neat rows while Hal watches on in deep amusement. Such is the DM life, you’re coming to realize.

“What if we push that--”

“No, I just put that there--”

“What about this--”

Shit continues on in this manner for a solid half hour before you finally decide that smashing a window is preferable to listening to Bro and Dirk squabble for one more second, at which point Hal absolutely loses his shit laughing and you catch Bro pouting that he didn’t get to finish the fucking puzzle. He wipes it away as soon as you’ve noticed, but for someone who was complaining about Hal’s _light_ puzzle elements, he sure is pissy he didn’t get to contend with them.

“You enter this creaky, foreboding bitch of a hut through the shattered glass window,” Hal wheezes out, narrating what you do as you do it. “Roll a dexterity saving throw to avoid slashing your precious toe beans to ribbons.”

You do, summoning them from the game’s internal sylladex, and letting them tumble to the floor on the other side of the window. “Aw fuck, my beans,” you say, upon seeing the three your dice have wrought. 

“Yeah, you take four damage. Poor kitty.”

“S’what he gets for sequence breaking,” grumbles the king sequence breaker himself, Bro Strider.

“Eat my furry ass, Bro.” You swish your tail at him and land on the other side of the window. Fortunately, Hal stopped short of the _pain_ part of the immersion, so you just feel an uncomfortable prickle, and if you bring up your character sheet UI, you can see your HP’s gone down. Now you’re tracking some bloody paw prints. 

“He can and he will,” Dirk - god you’ve entirely given up calling him Acorn, haven’t you? - rolls his own dex roll to get through the window and, of course, succeeds. Stupid sexy minmaxed rogue. Next comes Bro, who nails it about as well as he nails you on a regular basis, so. You know. Fuckin’ perfect. 

Or, fuckin’ purrfect?

Wow, you’re so lucky no one can hear your internal monologues. You’d get booed out of the stadium for a pun that classically bad.

Whoops, no time to contemplate that bullshit, Hal has repositioned himself in the hut in front of you, now wearing an outfit that suggests all manner of magical bullshit, and Dirk groans. 

“Really? You’re just gonna make yourself the villain? _Again _?”__

__“You know I had to do it to them,” Hal does a perfect shrug emoji with his whole body, and then enters maximum DMing mode, which you assume satisfies him exactly as much as whenever any of you cyber with him. “The warlock says, ‘What the hell are you doing here, and why are you breaking into my sicknasty hut?’”_ _

__You know what you must do. Before anyone can open their mouth and harsh your vibe, you say, “Yo, check it, I saw this on tiktok: I roll to seduce the warlock.”_ _

__Dirk practically explodes with exasperation, and Bro _snorts,_ which is essentially his equivalent of busting a gut. Hal’s eyebrows go way the fuck up, probably higher than they could go if he was a normal ass human guy, but you’re all kinda virtual right now, so who cares. Looks a little weird, but you’re used to Hal doing weird shit. _ _

__“I mean, alright, Akwete. Roll it, but you’re going to have to give me an actual seduction attempt here. No half-assing.”_ _

__“Oh, yeah, totally, I’m up to my ass in actual seduction attempts, man, I’ve got that shit comin’ out my ears. Babe, is that hardware in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Your delivery is so smooth. You are absolutely the smoothest motherfucker in this game. Dirk lets out a little wheeze like you’re physically murdering him. Out comes the die again, and you give it a toss. It tumbles to the ground and bounces around, clattering on the dirty floor before it rolls to a stop._ _

__Natural twenty._ _

__Bro guffaws, and if snorting is his equivalent of busting a gut, a _guffaw_ is him in the last death throes of hilarity before he ascends to a higher plane of existence. Dirk wheels around and thuds his head into the wall (you can just hear the ‘this has all gone pear-shaped, you’re gonna have to decapitate me’), and Hal bites back choked laughter._ _

__“Okay,” Hal says, “Alright. What do you want to do?”_ _

__You flash him a smile you know can stop hearts if you want it to because you are Dave motherfucking Strider, nevermind that you’re basically a cat right now so it probably hits different, and you walk up to Hal the warlock. He stares at you from behind his pointy shades as you come, but doesn’t stop you from putting a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” you say in the lowest, handsomest voice you can manage. “I wanna love and respect you for the rest of our lives, baby.”_ _

__It comes out more sincere than you intended, for such a bullshit situation. Well, they’re always telling you the best irony comes with a little bit of sincerity, right? Right? Fuck. “Uh,” you say in response to the long moment of silence that your statement garners, because, “Fuck, was that a lot? That was a lot, I should’ve--”_ _

__Hal pulls you in by the collar and lays one on you, and you realize his face is particularly flushed and circuit-y._ _

__Oh, nice. Score. Went over well. You are the _smoothest.__ _

__“Let me guess,” Bro says, flat and maybe a little amused. “‘Get out, I’m gonna fuck your wife now?’”_ _

__“I don’t know, I think we could just sit and watch,” Dirk replies._ _

__“That’s a wrap on D &D.”_ _

__“Yeah, we’re just getting into virtual reality voyeurism, now.”_ _

__Hal is too busy trying to make out with you for either of you to chime in._ _


End file.
